Philanthropy: how to efficiently donate to charity

10th December 2014

Simon Mackintosh, Partner and Head of Charities, and Richard Hyder, Head of Charity Investment, come together to discuss philanthropy and how one can give to charity in a tax-efficient manner. Watch their video here.

Richard: Philanthropy, there are many, many different definitions of philanthropy but for today's purposes we'll take one that philanthropy is the desire to promote the welfare of others particularly through generous donations to charitable causes. But, of course, philanthropy can be made at many different levels, it can be the general public giving money to charity, it can be people donating time and other resources and, these days, the nationwide charitable giving campaigns such as Comic Relief and Children In Need are very much part of our society and many, many people do participate in that.

Simon: And a lot of the work that we do with our clients is to do with tax effective support for charities, whether it is through income or capital that they are applying towards charitable causes. What we find is that people get to a point that they go beyond simply supporting individual appeals and collecting boxes and major national appeals, and they want to bring some structure to their charitable giving and support and that's really what we're talking about when we talk about philanthropy. And at that point people tend to set up their own charitable trust, charitable foundation, and use that as a vehicle for the work that they're doing to support charities. And the way in which people support charities in a tax effective way can either be during their lifetimes – so things like GiftAid, which many people are familiar with; ShareAid, which people are less familiar with but enables tax relief on donations of shares or land to charities; and, under their wills, people very often leave generous legacies to charities and there is a fairly new tax relief which increases the amount of incentive to give to charity if you leave at least 10% of your estate to charity. So, there are plenty of ways of giving to charities in a tax effective way either during lifetime or under your will.

Richard: Turcan Connell Charity Office is a package aimed at smaller grant-giving charitable trusts, and its intention is to take away the need for an office, which can actually be quite costly and it takes away the liability of running that. Charity Office itself can provide the help with the applications process, it can provide help with the grant giving and also regulatory compliance to the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCAR) and tax compliance to HMRC but, more widely, it can give consolidatory reporting to the trustees and also investment management of the assets within the charitable trust.

Simon: One of the particularly useful areas for Turcan Connell Charity Office is the smaller grant-giving charity, because we have found that sometimes they struggle to keep going, either because of the costs of running their own office and staff, and sometimes because of the difficulty in recruiting trustees. We can at least help them solve the office and staff issue by providing, through Turcan Connell Charity Office, one package which lets the charity be administered in a very cost effective way.